3D view
Introduction
The 3D view of FreeCAD is an instance of a Coin3D scenegraph. Coin3D is a library that implements the OpenInventor 2.1 scene description standard.
By the default the 3D view shows a small widget with coordinate axes, and the navigation cube also with coordinate axes; the grid can be displayed and configured using the Draft Workbench.
Actions
When the default Start Workbench is active, right clicking on the 3D view shows only one command:
- Navigation styles: different button styles to use with a 3-button mouse or laptop trackpad.
However, once a Workbench is loaded, there are additional commands:
- Link actions: creates different types of App::Link objects. introduced in version 0.19
- Fit all: pan and zoom the 3D view to fit all objects in the document in the screen.
- Fit selection: pan and zoom the 3D view to fit the currently selected object in the screen.
- Draw style: solid, wireframe, and point options.
- Standard views: isometric, top, bottom, left, right.
- Measure: create some measurements on the 3D view with the selected objects, or clear the measurements on the screen.
- Document window: docked, undocked, and fullscreen.
Additionally, depending on the workbench and object that is active, other command menus may become available. For example, with the Part Workbench and one object selected:
- Appearance: color and sizes of lines and vertices, and color of faces.
- Toggle visibility: hide or show.
- Toggle selectability: set to be able to be selected or not. Change the property by toggling ViewSelectable in the Property editor.
- Go to selection: select the object in the tree view.
- Random color: assign a random color to the object.
- Delete: delete the object.
For example, with the Draft Workbench and one object selected:
- Draft
- Utilities
Details
Since FreeCAD uses Qt as its graphical toolkit, FreeCAD uses the Quarter library to use Coin3D in a Qt environment.
Moreover, it is possible to interact directly with the 3D view scenegraph from the Python console by using the Python library Pivy.
For more information see the power user documentation:
- Scenegraph, description of Coin3D.
- Pivy, usage of Coin3D from the Python console.
- Third party libraries used by FreeCAD.
- Getting started
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